I don’t expect Scrivener (in the current beta or even in the near future) to run from a USB device, but for the heck of it I tried it out to see what happens. And I’ve noticed some interesting things:
Installed Scrivener 1.3 on my USB device, and during the installation process the Installer window jumped out of my screen, so that I could no longer see what the progress was, couldn’t drag it back down either; thanks to Win 7’s preview, I could at least watch the green progress bar on my taskbar See attached screen shot.
Scrivener unpacked entirely on the USB device, and only added Shortcuts to the C: drive, which I could clean up (send to recycle bin) easily without damaging the installation. I expect to have to do that even with some portable apps, so it’s really no problem.
When I launched Scrivener from the USB device, though, it created the templates folder on the C drive C:\users[myname]\AppData\Local\Scrivener\ProjectTemplates
Question here is – since the folder is empty – what’s the reason for it being generated upon launching Scrivener?
I don’t yet know if you can save created templates anywhere or only in a predefined location; if you can save them anywhere, then why this automatically generated folder? if not, then shouldn’t this folder be created only when a user saves a template in it? Just wondering…
It took Scrivener about 5 minutes to start up, during which it was already visible in Task Manager / Services, eating up quite a bit of memory (21,728 K). After it eventually came up, all it took was to click somewhere in the binder for it to completely crash down – not before eating up even more memory while it crashed (46,536 K).
Question here is – since it doesn’t unpack even the slightest bit outside of the specified folder (even if it’s not C:), why does it crash when launched from an USB device?
I don’t expect (or need) Scrivener to be portable, but its behavior when installed anywhere else but on C: brought up some worries as to how it’s designed to work in the background. I also may be completely wrong, and all this is absolutely normal behavior, but in the small event that it is not, could someone take a look at this in the eventuality of related installation issues?
Thanks a lot for taking the time to read my gibberish.
Lee & co – amazing job, this peace of software really lights up my writing-life! Thanks for bringing it to Windows!
I have a feeling these are case-specific issues. I can confirm the useless templates folder being created, but I have successfully run from a flash drive with no issues for over a week. I did not run into any issues at all while installing (Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit), despite already having an installed copy on the same computer (I did have to refresh the desktop shortcut as it was now pointing to the flash drive).
I have run from the flash drive on university computers running Windows 7 as well as a netbook. It was slow on the netbook, but not as slow as you have reported.
In list form:
Did not occur during my installation.
Confirmed. (Not a huge deal, as noted)
Confirmed. (Not a huge deal, as noted)
Did not occur on my tests.
Also, when it ran slow on the netbook, in my case the Beta Expiration Notification popped up almost immediately as expected, but the application took a decent length of time to initialize. Is this the same issue as yours? I did not experience any crashes, but in terms of launching, did that message pop up as expected?
The message popped up immediately, as did the dialog offering to create a new project from a template. I chose to open an existing project (also located on the flash drive, which is a 2.0, 16 GB and normally runs well), and THAT took about 5 mins. I will time it next time I try
Also, I had no Scrivener instance installed on the PC, and neither did I want to have any traces of it on C:, so I could monitor what Scrivener does when run from the flash drive.
I would assume it’s a hardware problem, if the PC I’m working on wouldn’t run perfectly otherwise.
–> HP Pavillion DV6000, dual core T2080 @1.73 GHz, 3GB RAM, running 32-bit Windows 7 Enterprise.
I haven’t experienced any problems in running Scrivener off of a flash drive so far, and I’ve run it under XP, 7, and Vista without issue. It’s running right now with a small project open and it’s only eating 4.8 MB of memory. I do have to note that I didn’t bother installing Scrivener directly to the Flash Drive however. Instead, I installed the software to the main machine and copied the program directory to the flash drive. Given that Scrivener seems to install all of its necessary components to its own directory, there shouldn’t be any major problem running it off of a flash drive, as long as the host machine is up to date software wise, and has enough memory. The only things I’m missing are the registry keys that Scrivener writes at install, which given how well it’s working, don’t seem to be very important.
If you’re experiencing performance issues, it could be due to a slow read/write rate, the large number of small files that Scrivener generates for its projects, or your files being fragmented and/or scattered all over the flash drive at lowest level (although with more modern Flash drives this is unlikely.) Most likely, issues related to opening a project have to do with a combination of poor read performance (USB), and the fact that there are many small files (the system never manages to get up to its highest transfer rates because it is always starting, stopping, and checking files.) To test if this is an issue with reading the project files I would try transferring the project to the computer, opening it through Scrivener. If the issue related to opening your file goes away, then it is may be due to the sheer number of small files that Scrivener creates for its projects. Unfortunately, if that is the case, the problem will probably get progressively worse the more items there are in the binder. This means that eventually it would become a problem no matter how fast your system and its storage are provided you generated a very large, complex project.
It’s too bad that Scrivener doesn’t store its files in an single archive by default, kind of like how a .docx file is actually a bunch of XML files and some folders zipped into one file. You can literally just change the extension to .zip and pull all the files out. While this requires you to decompress and recompress files on the fly, it gets around the initial read issue, provided the underlying system is fast enough and has sufficient memory. Ah well, I’m going off the deep end here.
I concur on the probable data transfer speeds, particularly given the large number of small files. It’s the probable cause for my own issues with the netbook. Bear in mind that USB 2.0 is pretty quick, but nothing at all compared to IDE or especially ATA drives like your hard drive.
I’d like to reaffirm that while I installed Scrivener to a thumb drive on a machine that already had it, I have used it on various machines that had no version of Scrivener available since.
Also, it seems to run extremely well for a program not intentionally designed for thumb drive use.
The short answer is that there is nothing to stop a user copying their entire Scrivener install folder onto a USB drive and taking Scrivener with them where ever they go. I have all three Scrivener versions on my 32GB memory stick. I certainly wouldn’t try to install Scrivener directly onto a USB stick though using the installer?
However, I’m in no position to support or advocate running Scrivener from a USB currently. My concern would be around performance and the devices people are using and the speed of their USB connections. There’s already been a lot of feedback from this forum regarding lag within early versions of the beta, in larger documents residing on USB sticks, I think users could once again expect lag etc… However, smaller projects, I couldn’t see any real problems.
See attached screen shot.
